Enriching Writing Ecosystems at
The Fifth Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants

co-located with

The 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2026)

Detroit, MI

The purpose of this interdisciplinary workshop is to facilitate discussion around writing assistants, thereby enhancing our understanding of their usage in writing process and predicting the consequences. To this end, we strive to bring together researchers from the human-computer interaction (HCI) and natural language processing (NLP) communities by alternating our workshop venue between HCI and NLP every year.

⬇️ Examples of new forms of human-machine collaborative writing. ⬇️

About the Workshop

Writing assistants have become increasingly multidimensional and sophisticated, fueled by advances in AI and interaction design. As this landscape expands, it is timely to consider how different underlying technologies (e.g., text analytics, LLMs), interaction designs (e.g., next-word prediction, chatbots, material interaction), and design goals (e.g., productivity, friction) fit together into broader ecosystems of tools and workflows. Future writing tools should support writers' idiosyncratic, multi-tool, and social writing processes.

In this hands-on, systems-centric workshop, we challenge the UIST community to explore and develop ecosystems of writing assistants through the lens of interoperability. Participants will engage in a highly interactive tool-swapping collaborative writing exercise where research and commercial systems are used side-by-side. Through playful provocation and intentional defamiliarization, participants will identify system interplay friction and collaboratively outline design guidelines for building adaptable writing assistants that enrich diverse workflows and integrate into lasting technological ecosystems.

Now in its fifth iteration, our workshop seeks to facilitate discussions on designing and building cohesive writing ecosystems — bridging technical systems, design values, and community paradigms. Our objectives are to bridge interdisciplinary communities; to critique the flexibility, interoperability, and normative ground of current tools; and to envision the future design and study of writing assistants amongst a flourishing landscape. In addition to HCI and NLP research, we welcome participants from fields such as the Education Sciences, English and Rhetoric, and Linguistics.

Participate

Joining the workshop does not require a paper submission. To take part, sign up for the workshop when you register for UIST 2026. You can also register for the workshop on its own, without registering for the full conference.

Questions? Email us at in2writing.workshop@gmail.com.

Schedule

09:00 - 9:05am	Welcome
09:05 - 9:20am	Workshop Intro and Participant Intros
09:20 - 10:30am	Keynote Panel featuring Tom McGee, Max Kreminski, and Ken Arnold
10:30 - 11:00am	UIST Workshops Morning Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:15pm	Tool-swapping Writing Activity 1
12:15 - 1:45pm	Lunch Break
01:45 - 2:45pm	Tool-swapping Writing Activity 2
02:45 - 3:00pm	Follow-up discussions from the group activity
03:00 - 3:30pm	UIST Workshops Afternoon Coffee Break
03:30 - 4:30pm	Tool-Swap Activity Reflection & Future of Writing Tools
04:30 - 4:50pm	Community Paper Proposal
04:50 - 5:00pm	Closing

Speakers

• Keynote Panelist: Tom McGee

  • 

  • Fears, Frills, and Foundations

  • Tom is the Product Director of User Generated Content (UGC) at Wattpad. In his eight years at the company, he has overseen content development, creator development + retention, and consulted on product features, interactive fiction, social features, LLMs, and developed and ran a multi-million dollar Creator Program. He is currently overseeing the UGC Catalogue and working various teams to improve algorithmic suggestion, identify content at scale, hone and deploy LLM tooling to address risk and content quality, and help to grow smaller genre spaces. A lifelong storyteller, Tom has spent his career helping writers tell the best versions of their story possible. A published writer and award-winning playwright himself, Tom also works as a dramaturge/script consultant to acclaimed writer/director Kat Sandler, most recently working in her writer's room on her #1 hit TV YAGA (Crave, AMC+) starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Noah Reid, Clark Backo, and Hudson Williams. With Kat, Tom founded and ran Theatre Brouhaha in Toronto, as well as Shakey-Shake and Friends Puppet Shakespeare, where he produced, wrote, performed, and occasionally puppeteered for over 30 productions. He has toured Canada and has had his puppets featured on TSN's coverage of Wimbledon. Tom also co-runs Canada's largest tabletop roleplaying game liveplay podcast network, Dumb-Dumbs & Dice, where his long-running comedy D&D show Dumb-Dumbs & Dragons among other shows he's show run, game mastered for, or performed on have been downloaded over 27 million times. Tom is a graduate of Queen's University (BaH Theatre + Classics) and the University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre, & Performance Studies (MA). He lives in Mississauga, Ontario with his wife, son and entirely too much Lego.

• Keynote Panelist: Max Kreminski

  • 

  • Six Fingers on the Author's Hand

  • Max Kreminski is an assistant professor of Design Tech at Cornell Tech. As a human-computer interaction and AI researcher with a particular focus on creativity support tools, Max has worked to create new interfaces, interaction techniques, and models that can scaffold creative processes in a wide variety of domains, as well as to introduce new, domain-general methods for evaluating CSTs. Max's research has been featured in outlets such as The New Yorker, New Scientist, and The Verge; published and exhibited at top HCI and AI conferences, including CHI, UIST, NeurIPS, and EMNLP; and honored with a variety of awards, including the Best Paper award at the ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition.

• Keynote Panelist: Ken Arnold

  • 

  • Thoughtful

  • Ken Arnold is an associate professor of computer science and data science at Calvin University. His Thoughtful AI Tools Lab builds and studies AI tools for writers that guard human thinking. He has mentored undergraduate student researchers and developers to build Thoughtful, an extensible writing toolkit integrated into Word and Google Docs. He holds graduate degrees from Harvard and MIT.

Organizers

You can contact the organizers by emailing in2writing.workshop@gmail.com.

Advisors

Sponsors

Interested in supporting the workshop? We would love to hear from you — please reach out to in2writing.workshop@gmail.com.